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“Do you prefer to bury your head in the sand? It doesn’t change things. Grow the fuck up.” He drained his whiskey.
I pushed the chair back. “Screw you, Raphael. You try putting yourself in my shoes for a split second, then tell me to grow the fuck up,” I said, standing.
“Sit,” he growled.
“No.”
“Just fucking sit. Ask me a question. A different one.”
“Are you going to stop being a jerk?”
He gave me a lopsided smile. “I’ll try, but no promises. It’s my nature.”
I hesitated.
“Sit down and talk to me,” he said finally.
I wasn’t sure if it was his tone or his words that made me do it, that made me sit back down and meet his eyes and feel at least a little closer to equal footing for the first time with this man.
He nodded in acknowledgment.
“Is this home for you?” I asked.
He inhaled deeply. He took his time to answer, and I thought about what he’d told me earlier, what he’d promised. Truth.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s where things were good. It’s where I remember my mother. Where I remember my brothers and me as kids.” He paused. “I remember being happy mostly.”
Hearing him say that last part, it was strange. In a way, it almost hurt me to hear it. I felt the loneliness coming off him, and I realized it was always there, every time I was with him. No matter what, no matter the insane reasons I sat in this beautiful house in Tuscany across from this beautiful beast in the middle of the night, that was what I always felt from him. Loneliness. Maybe that was why I had questions to ask. Maybe that was why I wanted to know him. It was naive, I knew it, and that little voice inside my head sounded its warning again, but I felt his pain lying just beneath that cool, detached surface.
Raphael suffered. He suffered greatly.
“It’s normal to miss your mom,” I said. “And your brothers and the past.”
He looked confused for a moment, and all I could do was think of how much what I’d just said applied to me.
We sat quietly, and I finished my tea. Raphael tilted my mug to glance inside it, and before I could stop him, he’d poured more whiskey into it. Not much, maybe half what he had. He handed it back, and I picked it up. Sipping it straight was harder than when it was mixed with the tea, but I did it, liking the warmth, the tingling feeling in my spine, relaxing a little even.
It was me who finally broke the long silence with a confession of my own.
“When my mom was seventeen, she eloped with my dad. She ran away from Grandfather to do it because she was pregnant with me.” I felt him watching me, and I wondered why I told him that. Although, he probably already knew the story. In fact, it seemed like he knew more about me than I did. “Do you ever think about your father? About why he did it? Even though he had no intention to harm your mother physically, didn’t he know how much it would hurt her, even considering his circumstances?”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop by about a thousand degrees, and I regretted asking the question the moment the words were out.
“My father was a bastard, a coward, a cheat, and ultimately, a murderer. But he was also desperate.”
Silence hung heavy in the air between us until, finally, I found my voice. “I’m sorry.”
He raised his eyebrows and tipped his glass toward me before drinking it down.
“Do you only want me for the money? Is that why you took me, because my grandfather couldn’t pay?” I had grown a little bolder after swallowing the last of the whiskey. “I mean, you have to wait until I’m twenty-one to get it. What if I don’t sign over the shares?”
“Do you want me to want you for more?” he asked.
I raised my gaze to his, surprised by his question.
“Truth, Sofia.”
My face heated both from the question and the intensity of his gaze on me. I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t know myself what I wanted.
“I never thought I’d be married…like this. That’s all.” I reached for the bottle and tilted it to pour in a little more.
“Too much truth?” he asked, studying me. Seeing right through me.
I swirled the whiskey in my glass then drained it and poured myself a little more.
“You probably shouldn’t drink so fast,” he said.
“You said I should ask you my real questions. I’m asking. Now you have to answer.”
He smiled. “I asked if you had things you’d like to talk about. I didn’t say I’d talk about them.”
He took the bottle and corked it.
“That’s not really fair,” I said.
“Life isn’t fair.”
His eyes told me how deeply he knew that truth.
